The Night Watchman

Much different than I had expected, in a more-so sort of way, and it just kept getting better. This is not, contrary to whay you may have heard, the Inspiring Story of One Man Standing Up to Powerful Forces — well, not only that. It's... I don't really know. It's a series of threads, of lives, touching irregularly but with startling force each time they do; their relationships building something powerful yet sublime and ephemeral while keeping each thread distinct. If Erdrich were a composer this would be one hell of a symphony.

This is my second Erdrich book; I will look for more. She writes with grace. Treats her characters with respect, spending time and words on each, giving them a vivid threedimensional life. The best way I can think of to describe it is, it's not like I “felt like I knew the characters”: more like I was fascinated by each one, and learned much about them, but never got to know them, which is so much like life: even our close friends and lovers are their own people, heck, we're often a mystery to our own selves. We will be innocent at moments, dignified others, we find strength when we need to, despair at other times; and when we find good people we want to be with them more, hold on to them, learn more. These were good people. (Not all. But that, too, is real life).

Solid 4.5 stars; rounding up because many hours after finishing I'm still thinking about the story, the characters, the small but vivid window into Native American life; and I'm feeling a lot of complicated emotions, most of all gratitude.

Took me a while to get used to Erdrich's terse writing, but I warmed up to it. Super economical—amazing what she could say with so little.

Interwoven, complex view of a community. All the little details of how people related to each other and lived with each other made everything seem alive. (No doubt a lot of it sourced from talking to the author's grandfather and own community members.)

As a testament to how much I loved this, I was really struggling with my “books can only come and go, not stay, in the 31' travel trailer in which I currently live” policy, wanting to hang on to this foreverrrrrrr. Then a good friend I saw this past weekend said they'd been wanting to read Erdich but couldn't decide where to start, and that felt like the kind of interconnectedness that Erdich herself would appreciate, so off it went. This novel is just gorgeous. It seems to me that writers who create both poetry and prose well have especially gobsmacking prose, and that is certainly true of Erdich. It documents her ancestors' experience of the federal attempt to “terminate” (what an evil word/concept) the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in the 1950s in ways that always feel evocative, not didactic, and I'm hard-pressed to think of a novel with this many characters whose humanity is all drawn in full-fledged detail, not to mention a few ghosts and assorted animals. So I suppose humanity isn't the right word, but aliveness. Will definitely be reading more of her work.

A semi-biographical novel based on the author's grandfather, who fought Arthur V. Watkins' attempt to terminate government recognition of Indian tribes. Set in 1953 on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota, the story brings together the experiences of Thomas Wazhask, the night watchman of the book's title, and Patrice Paranteau, a young woman who works at the jewel bearing factory where Wazhask is the watchman.

Thomas has a wife and kids, and memories of his education at the state Indian boarding school. He finds out about Watkins' bill to “emancipate” Indians from their reservations, and is troubled enough to organize some action to try to stop it.

Patrice is a recent high school graduate who was lucky enough to get a job at the jewel bearing plant. Her paychecks support her mom and younger brother as well as herself. However, she is troubled because her older sister, Vera, moved to Minneapolis and then disappeared. She arranges to take time off from her job to go to Minneapolis and look for her.

Surrounding Thomas and Patrice is a tight knit community of whites and Indians who know each other and look out for each other, even though they might not always understand each other very well.

This is a great story for descriptions of Ojibwe culture on a reservation and the challenges that tribes faced in the mid 20th century and still face today.

I'm not out here trying to offer up hot takes. This is a Pulitzer Prize winning book after all, so if anything the fault is probably mine if this elicits a noncommittal shrug from me.

I'm supposed to effuse about how I'm in good hands with this cavalcade of characters that traipse across the page. Thomas Wazhashk, based on Louise Erdrich's own grandfather, the night watchman and Chippewa Council Member for the Turtle Mountain clan fighting against a government bill of “emancipation” His niece Patrice, working the factory setting jewels where she's caught the eyes of the white boxing coach Lloyd Barnes as well as the boxer he's training, Wood Mountain - who joins Patrice as she sets off into the city to find her lost sister Vera. There's the pair of Mormon's cursing the cold and trying to convert the Indigenous Lamanites while secretly loathing each other, and graduate student Millie Cloud come down to fight the bill on its way to Congress.

Not to mention the ghost of a dead boy, a waterjack, and a gun toting Puerto Rican nationalist. And yes, Erdrich does manage to give each their due and clearly delineate them on the page. But I still found it plodding with multiple strange digressions and meandering threads that are simply noted in passing.

Stories built up over pages are resolved with a sentence or two and set aside. Perhaps a nod to the direct way the Indigenous folks in the story simply note things as they are in plain spoken English in contrast to the flowery word-smithing of senators hiding daggers in their innocuous ten-dollar words, looking to “emancipate the Indian.” But I kept wanting more to grab onto here, something to warrant higher praise than “it was fine.”